A Dictionary of Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. Hotten John Camden
rel="nofollow" href="#n5" type="note">5 in speaking of beggars and Gipseys, says, “they have devised a language among themselves which they name CANTING, but others Pedlars’ Frenche.”
Now the word CANT in its old sense, and SLANG6 in its modern application, although used by good writers and persons of education as synonymes, are in reality quite distinct and separate terms. Cant, apart from religious hypocrisy, refers to the old secret language, by allegory or distinct terms, of Gipseys, thieves, tramps, and beggars. Slang represents that evanescent, vulgar language, ever changing with fashion and taste, which has principally come into vogue during the last seventy or eighty years, spoken by persons in every grade of life, rich and poor, honest and dishonest.7 Cant is old; Slang is always modern and changing. To illustrate the difference: a thief in Cant language would term a horse a PRANCER or a PRAD, – while in slang, a man of fashion would speak of it as a BIT OF BLOOD, or a SPANKER, or a NEAT TIT. A handkerchief, too, would be a BILLY, a FOGLE, or a KENT RAG, in the secret language of low characters, – whilst amongst vulgar persons, or those who aped their speech, it would be called a RAG, a WIPE, or a CLOUT. Cant was formed for purposes of secrecy. Slang is indulged in from a desire to appear familiar with life, gaiety, town-humour, and with the transient nick names and street jokes of the day. Both Cant and Slang, I am aware, are often huddled together as synonymes, but they are distinct terms, and as such should be used.
To the Gipseys, beggars and thieves are undoubtedly indebted for their Cant language. The Gipseys landed in this country early in the reign of Henry the Eighth. They were at first treated as conjurors and magicians, – indeed they were hailed by the populace with as much applause as a company of English theatricals usually receive on arriving in a distant colony. They came here with all their old Eastern arts of palmistry, fortune-telling, doubling money by incantation and burial, – shreds of pagan idolatry; and they brought with them, also, the dishonesty of the lower caste of Asiatics, and the vagabondism they had acquired since leaving their ancient dwelling places in the East, many centuries before. They possessed, also, a language quite distinct from anything that had been heard in England, and they claimed the title of Egyptians, and as such, when their thievish wandering propensities became a public nuisance, were cautioned and proscribed in a royal proclamation by Henry VIII.8 The Gipseys were not long in the country before they found native imitators. Vagabondism is peculiarly catching. The idle, the vagrant, and the criminal outcasts of society, caught an idea from the so called Egyptians – soon corrupted to Gipseys. They learned from them how to tramp, sleep under hedges and trees, to tell fortunes, and find stolen property for a consideration – frequently, as the saying runs, before it was lost. They also learned the value and application of a secret tongue, indeed all the accompaniments of maunding and imposture, except thieving and begging, which were well known in this country long before the Gipseys paid it a visit, – perhaps the only negative good that can be said in their favour.
Harman, in the year 1566, wrote a singular, not to say droll book, entitled, A Caveat for commen Cvrsetors, vulgarley called Vagabones, newly augmented and inlarged, wherein the history and various descriptions of rogues and vagabonds are given, together with their canting tongue. This book, the earliest of the kind, gives the singular fact that within a dozen years after the landing of the Gipseys, companies of English vagrants were formed, places of meeting appointed, districts for plunder and begging operations marked out, and rules agreed to for their common management. In some cases Gipseys joined the English gangs, in others English vagrants joined the Gipseys. The fellowship was found convenient and profitable, as both parties were aliens to the laws and customs of the country, living in a great measure in the open air, apart from the lawful public, and often meeting each other on the same bye-path, or in the same retired valley; – but seldom intermarrying, and entirely adopting each other’s habits. The common people, too, soon began to consider them as of one family, – all rogues, and from Egypt. The secret language spoken by the Gipseys, principally Hindoo and extremely barbarous to English ears, was found incomprehensible and very difficult to learn. The Gipseys, also, found the same difficulty with the English language. A rude, rough, and most singular compromise was made, and a mixture of Gipsey, Old English, newly-coined words, and cribbings from any foreign, and therefore secret language, mixed and jumbled together, formed what has ever since been known as the CANTING LANGUAGE, or PEDLER’S FRENCH; or, during the past century, ST. GILES’ GREEK.
Such was the origin of CANT; and in illustration of its blending with the Gipsey or Cingari tongue, dusky and Oriental from the sunny plains of Central Asia, I am enabled to give the accompanying list of Gipsey, and often Hindoo words, with, in many instances, their English adoptions.
9 In those instances, indicated by a *, it is impossible to say whether or not we are indebted to the Gipseys for the terms. Dad, in Welsh, also signifies a father. Cur is stated to be a mere term of reproach, like “Dog,” which in all European languages has been applied in an abusive sense. Objections may also be raised against Gad and Maund.
10 Jabber, I am reminded, may be only another form of GABBER, GAB, very common in Old English, from the Anglo-Saxon, GÆBBAN.
Here then we have the remarkable fact of several words of pure Gipsey and Asiatic origin going the round of Europe, passing into this country before the Reformation, and coming down to us through numerous generations purely in the mouths of the people. They have seldom been written or used in books, and simply as vulgarisms have they reached our time. Only a few are now cant, and some are household words. The word JOCKEY, as applied to a dealer or rider of horses, came from the Gipsey, and means in that language a whip. Our standard dictionaries give, of course, none but conjectural etymologies. Another word, BAMBOOZLE, has been a sore difficulty with lexicographers. It is not in the old dictionaries, although extensively used in familiar or popular language for the last two centuries; in fact, the very word that Swift, Butler, L’Estrange, and Arbuthnot would pick out at once as a telling and most serviceable term. It is, as we have seen, from the Gipsey; and here I must state that it was Boucher who first drew attention to the fact, although in his remarks on the dusky tongue, he has made a ridiculous mistake by concluding it to be identical with its offspring, CANT. Other parallel instances, with but slight variations from the old Gipsey meanings, could be mentioned, but sufficient examples have been adduced to show that Marsden, the great Oriental scholar in the last century, when he declared before the Society of Antiquaries that the Cant of English thieves and beggars had nothing to do with the language spoken by the despised Gipseys, was in error. Had the Gipsey tongue been analysed and committed to writing three centuries ago, there is every probability that many scores of words now in common use could be at once traced to its source. Instances continually occur now-a-days of street vulgarisms ascending to the drawing-rooms of respectable society. Why, then, may not the Gipsey-vagabond alliance three centuries ago have contributed its quota of common words to popular speech?
I feel confident there is a Gipsey element in the English language hitherto unrecognised; slender it may be, but not, therefore, unimportant.
“Indeed,” says Moore the poet, in a humorous little book, Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress, 1819, “the Gipsey language, with the exception of such terms as relate to their own peculiar customs, differs but little from the regular Flash or Cant language.” But this was magnifying the importance of the alliance. Moore knew nothing of the Gipsey tongue other than the few Cant words put into the mouths of the beggars, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedy of the Beggar’s Bush, and Ben Jonson’s Masque of the Gipseys Metamorphosed, – hence his confounding Cant with Gipsey speech, and appealing to the Glossary of Cant for so called “Gipsey” words at the end of the Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew, to bear him out in his assertion. Still his remark bears much truth, and proof would have been found long ago if any scholar had taken the trouble to examine the “barbarous jargon of Cant,” and to have compared it with Gipsey speech. As George Borrow, in his Account of the Gipseys in Spain, eloquently concludes his second volume, speaking of the connection of the Gipseys with Europeans: – “Yet from this temporary association were produced two results: European fraud became sharpened by coming into
The word Slang, as will be seen in the chapter upon that subject, is purely a Gipsey term, although now-a-days it refers to low or vulgar language of any kind, – other than cant. Slang and Gibberish in the Gipsey language are synonymous; but, as English adoptions, have meanings very different from that given to them in their original.
The vulgar tongue consists of two parts: the first is the Cant Language; the second, those burlesque phrases, quaint allusions, and nick names for persons, things, and places, which, from long uninterrupted usage, are made classical by prescription. —
“Outlandish people calling themselves